Power of People

WE BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF PEOPLE TO HUMANIZE FOR

GROWTH.

We created Innate Motion, because we saw the need to apply more human logic to business, in a world that tends to apply too much business logic to humans. We saw how systems and organizations could dehumanize, and how people re-humanize. Surprisingly, if there is one discipline in business that could do the most, it is marketing.

It is often easier to get production people or the engineering department to think, do and be human, than the marketers we work with everyday. We believe that people create better brands, products, and policies when they know whom they are doing it for, and why it really matters to them.

We help people better understand the social realities in which to create value.

Be it practical value, personal value or cultural value. Value creation does not come from detachment and the exercise of power, but from participation and empathic engagement. Marketing is an embodied and embedded craft.

Our conviction is that three basic practices can enable marketers to humanize for growth.

1. Beyond the target, see the ‘human’ in everyone.

2. Beyond the category, take on a human scope.

3. Beyond the rational, put more human logic to play.

IN EVERYONESEE THE HUMAN

apply the logic of war with diligence, but in the process dehumanize other people and their circumstances by transforming them from people into cold hard data. We know that we can’t truly empathize with the vulnerability and struggles of another unless we are able to acknowledge the same vulnerabilities and struggles in ourselves.

The root cause to this inability of marketers to humanize for growth is that they very often act as detached technicians who engineer propositions within a cultural vacuum. They trust systems and their institutional ways more than their embodied and embedded human experiences. We call it the Cartesian mind trap. They act much like military strategists who

Beyond the target...

Mandela is a great practitioner of this. He shows us what marketing can be. He put marketing at the service of a human purpose, driven by a deep understanding of what moves people and what leadership can be. He applied the practice of seeing the human inside under extreme conditions.

The Apartheid system in South Africa was an extreme dehumanizing system. Mandela was a “46664” for 27 years — he knew what de-humanization meant. Yet, in all the time Mandela was imprisoned, often in solitary confinement, he chose to befriend his jailers. He reached out to them as unique individuals with their own personal struggles. Rather than attempting to be invulnerable and stoic, he chose to be humane. His jailers experienced him as a human being.

Their preconceived biases melted away as they came to admire Mandela and finally trust him as a fellow human being whose struggles were not unlike their own. As a president, he operated as a human being — never departing from his own humanity — and looked at every South African as a human being. By recognizing the humanity in others, he saw their struggles and dilemmas that he too could relate to. To see the human in others allowed him to take on a constructive attitude to others and see past the negative. For us it is a professional choice, but in the case of Nelson Mandela it is extraordinary that a man who was ill-treated and placed in dehumanizing conditions for most of his life can be so human, think so human and do so human.

A man of profound humanity.

Be human. Think human. Do human.

Our own experience has taught us that if we can enable people in business to better empathize with themselves and the people they are trying to serve, their abilities to be creative and relevant as a business or brand substantially improves.

As people we value meaning more than the mechanics that enable it. Yet in business, and as marketers, we tend to dehumanize consumers as targets, and we spend too much time applying the mechanics of messaging to penetrate their minds. We seem to forget that they are people first, much like ourselves.

As people we value relationships more than transactions. As people our frame of reference are other people and the social realities we find ourselves in. Yet as marketers our frame of reference is all to often the products we bring to market or the categories in which they compete. Added value can only be created where human relevance can be found, and very often we lack insight

into the larger context – the emotional experiences of being a parent, an engineer, a woman, a marketer etc. within a specific culture or situation, to enact this value. The frame of reference we use to position ourselves, our actions or our beliefs will define the value people will give to them.

TAKE ON A HUMAN SCOPE

Beyond the category...

But what instead?

As a true master of change and complexity, he focused on making things that seem difficult, easy. He had to build a self-belief and pride in this new and fragile democracy and was looking for an idea that could enable this. He was in his first month in office when he spoke of “a rainbow nation at

peace with itself and the world”. The idea transcended the description of what post-apartheid South Africa could be. The “rainbow nation” elevated the multi-colored reality of South Africa into a symbol of peace and beauty. It turned a country that had been the shame of the world into a place that celebrated what is the most beautiful in humanity. It offered all communities a common meaning, a shared sense of pride for an idea that turned differences between people from the country’s biggest weakness into its biggest strength. It served a culture of reconciliation that became more than a practice, but a source of social identity to belong to. Or as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, it was about uniting the “Rainbow People of God”.

v

Redefining South Africa.

Mandela is a big picture strategist. He fight was not only against apartheid and white domination, but for the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. He knew that his biggest job for healing this nation was to reset the culture at play in it. He knew that once the people of

South Africa had elected him as their president, the people of South Africa needed a new path, a human path to a brighter and better future.

How could the country re-invent itself? How could people trust him to follow his agenda? How could people come together when they had been pitted against each other? No apartheid, sure.

Nelson Mandela was well aware that he needed both white and black support to achieve his agenda. There were times, claimed some of his critics, that Mandela seemed to spend more time easing white fears than relieving black hardship. Mandela was focused on winning over the Afrikaners, and he knew he had to address their hearts, not only their brains. For the white South African the idea of the rainbow nation was not an easy idea to buy into. They were the ones who felt they had most to lose. They wrongly enjoyed all the benefits of the apartheid system.

Mandela knew that prejudice was not rational and that he could not address it only in a rational way. He needed the white to accept democracy not only intellectually but also emotionally. The

standard preach to the choir was not going to do the job — he needed a way for the white people of South Africa to care about democracy. Mandela realized that he needed to respond to the identity appeal of these guys more than their reason.

Also here Nelson Madela’s ability to see human inside everyone, along with his ability to ‘take on a human scope’ enable him to make change happen. While in prison he learned much about the Afrikaner and he understood they were proud people, much like himself. Mandela understood that there were profound similarities between the African and Afrikaner. Both suffered from a sense of insecurity. Both had been oppressed by the British. Afrikaners has been demeaned by Healing a nation.

the British imperialists, treated as boorish second class citizens only a step up from Africans. They too felt like scorned outsiders. As a people, they had a collective chip on their shoulder, not so different from the black South Africans under apartheid. He understood what made them tick.

So when the threats to harmony in

South Africa were greatest, 1994 and 1995, Mandela turned to sports as one way of reconciling and healing the nation. He needed to link the idea of the rainbow nation to the types of actions the Afrikaner esteemed and considers legitimate and important. Nothing was more important to white South Africans than Springbok rugby. For years, the ANC had done everything it could to get the Springboks, the national rugby team, banned from international play. And they had succeeded. Now Mandela sought to have the ban on them lifted, and he became instrumental in bringing the rugby World Cup to South Africa. He began a charm campaign to win over the rugby establishment. He befriended Francois Pienaar, the six-

foot-seven Springbok captain, who fell under his spell. He made a number of visits to the team, rugged Afrikaners who at best were apolitical and who were mistrustful of a black leader and black politics.

The day before the Springboks were to play the reigning champion, Australia, in May 1995, Mandela flew to their training camp to tell them they were playing for the whole country and that the whole nation, white and black, was behind them. He went there to inspire this team to be better than they think they can be. As the team manager later told journalist John Carlin, “He had won their hearts.”

To humanize marketing, a far deeper understanding of people and their living realities is needed, and this is a much harder task than describing the virtues of a product or policy.

In business, we tend to view the consumer as using two basic models to make sense of their daily lives and the products they buy. Marketing got stuck in one them.

The Homo Economist

The first model assumes that as consumers we weight our alternatives, assess the value of each one, and then choose the alternative that yields us the most value. This model assumes people are self interested and rational. It assumes that we make decisions because it makes rational sense, not necessarily human sense. The product

PUT MORE HUMANLOGIC TO PLAY

Beyond the rational...

and its unique features define the story and the arguments, and the marketer seeks to position its proposition within a narrowly defined category or within a self-defined industry.

This is a useful model up to a point.

The Homo Empathicus

The second model of decision-making is quite different. It recognizes that consumers are people first. It values human sense making based on the people we choose to be and the social realities in which we find ourselves. It gives enough consideration to our beliefs and values to make sense of our everyday life. This model considers reality to be something we create together out of our shared experiences and ideas we want to participate in.

choice, but a powerful symbolic choice that could enact a culture of reconciliation and embody the idea of the rainbow nation. It was staged to reduce anxieties of the white people and to bring them into the franchise of the rainbow nation.

Tokyo Sexwale, imprisoned with Mandela on Robben Island, said, “That was the moment when I understood more clearly than ever before that the liberation struggle was not so much about liberating blacks from bondage, it was about liberating white people from fear.” Afrikaners, like my brother who still lives there, saw the effort Mandela had made; he had come more than halfway to meet them when he had not needed to move at all. In the end, Afrikaners understood that and came to trust him.

1995. Ellis Park Stadium. Nelson Mandela strides across the field, the mostly white crowd suddenly erupts in cheers:

“Nel-son, Nel-son, Nel-son”.

The Springboks, the South African national team, are about to play the word cup final. The crowd has just realized that Mandela has done the unthinkable: in his most famous gesture of reconciliation, as he walks to greet the team captains, he is wearing the Springbok jersey and cap. The day is in the memories of all South Africans.

He did what most marketers would deem impossible. He converted non-lovers into trusting advocates of his agenda.

What happened at Ellis Park was probably the greatest act of reconciliation in the history of sports. It was not a popular

An idea to embody.

Ideas we can touch.Ideas we can touch.Ideas we can touch.

While many people in business are ready and willing to be empathic, get into people’s lives and have a genuine desire to better the lives of the people they serve, their thinking tools about on how to enroll people into a vision to align the human agenda of people and the business agenda of their company or brand is weak.

They focus on practical problems, not human dilemmas. They offer people products to buy, not ideas to buy into. They get stuck in the organization space, forgetting products and brands must perform beyond the organization space, but in people’s living spaces.

Companies and brands thrive when they provide and enable human sense. Companies and brands fail when they

provide non-sense. Sometimes we lose our human sense in business because we focus too much on business sense. The best brands seek to align what matters to people and what matters to the business

As marketers, we are in the business of human sense-making.